The comments you are responding to aren't referencing AT&T as egregious, but the misrepresentation of AT&T's intentions, given that AT&T desired the polar opposite of what the court ordered them to do, which was to split up. The above commenter was trying to portray AT&T as getting their way by splitting up, as if that was their devious intention all along.

I have a hard time parsing the position of the comment in question. As if allowed was just an unfortunate choice of word.

The sentence before allowed had a bunch of stuff about Ronald Reagan and I wanted to avoid the political aspect.

In any event, the whole thing went down and was determined long before Reagan took office. The case was filed under the Ford administration and prosecuted mainly by the Carter administration. By the time Reagan took office the case had been in progress for nearly a decade, and he had been president for barely a year when the final decision was handed down.

OP just has so much confused about this chapter of history.